Plagiarism, fork or simple mistake? The Shiba Inu Community debates the origin story of the Shibarium

For the SHIB token and Shibarium blockchain community, it’s the difference between plagarized code and recycled open source code.

The drama began on Thursday Asian time when an established member of the Discord chain pointed to the Shibarium chain with the same chain ID number, 917, as the Rinia Testnet chain.

While Discord members were quick to generate their own explanations for the similarity, with some panic selling the token pushing it down 10%, the explanation from the developers behind the Shibarium chain is something far more benign.

“Few chain IDs were randomly picked – 417(Alpha), 517(Staging), 917(pre-pod/beta) and these chains were not registered anywhere at the time, I made a mistake not to double check when the puppy network was launched” tweeted Kaaldhairyaone of the pseudonymous developers.

Kaaldhairya tweeted that they were “redistributing a new version of the BETA network with a new chain ID.”

“Fresh deployments will be rare in the future, but are possible because we will still be in the BETA phase,” he continued.

Others pointed to similarities in code found on Github, a code repository.

Coders often reuse each other’s work for mundane and benign tasks. These pre-written blocks are known as libraries, and are available as open source. That is, code that is intended to be copied and reused.

Andrew Angrisani, a member of the project’s Telegram community as well as Discord, and a crypto-security engineer, explained the code similarities of both Rinia and Shibarium using the same open source code.

“Both Rinia TestNet and Shibarium copied the open source code for their block explorers called Blockscout, and both were probably lazy in their implementation,” he said.

Another high-ranking community member, JesusM, called all of this a “minor mistake made in beta.” JesusM said this is the point of the beta process.

“Flaws in it are being tested and then fixed,” they said.

Angrisani speculated that part of this could be a ploy to drum up free marketing for Rinia and an upcoming project.

“Rinia Testnet chain Dev is launching an ICO for Firechain called Shib Killer on March 31. They can use this mud in the water to make free marketing since the ChainIDs were the same,” he said. “It may be an artifact of copying source code from an open source project.”

This isn’t the first time accusations have flown around either. In February, questions were raised on Discord about similarities between Shibarium and Rinia.

“At the end of the day, Shibaroum is probably still a long way off, open source is being used (which is fine – other projects do), the Unification Fund is still working on Shibarium, and the Firechain/Rinia developer is using this to promote their upcoming ICO,” Angrisani concluded.

While the SHIB token has recovered some of its losses since the initial sale, it is still down 8% on the day.